Salads

“Hi, my name is Bre, and I have a problem with lettuce.”
Yes, it’s true. I’ve never really taken to the whole traditionally-defined salad category. I just never saw how iceberg or romaine lettuce could be interesting enough to warrant me choosing a salad over, oh, any far superior dish on the menu. I mean, don’t get me wrong— there are some rad salad dressings out there (Thai peanut, goddess, Chinese sesame)— but all these seem to do is disguise the lettuce as a makeshift entrée (like, “hey, let’s make a salad that tastes...

I’m not sure why, but people seem very judgmental and ill-informed about the whole business of pickling. I mean, when you get down to it, “a pickled vegetable” is really just a vegetable that someone has poured vinegar over and then walked away from for a few minutes. Yeh, that’s all.
It was only in a recent conversation with my mother, during which her reaction to pickling was “oh, that’s gonna take FOREVER,” that I became aware of the misconception. As if pickling is a task that is culturally united with basket...

Put plainly, this dish rocks. It has it all: crisp, spicy, fishy (ok, that’s not really a flavor profile), salty, sweet, creamy, chewy, and on and on. It’s so great that it’s beyond categorization, although it’s probably closest to Thai or Malaysian, if I were really pressed to pigeonhole it (please don’t make me!) Admittedly, I mostly made this recipe because I was convinced that in some way, the flavors wouldn’t work together. But, they were brilliant. Everything was exceptionally colorful on the plate, and though I...